IMAGINING A RIGHT-SIZED LIMBAUGH'S WORLD VIEW

He's almost through his first week at rehab. Rush Limbaugh is not feeling
very good right now, Robin Piper predicts.

When you are hooked for years on high-powered painkillers, getting off them
can be nothing short of torture. "Muscle aches, cramps, sweating, chills,
anxiety, fatigue" - they're all on the list, Piper says.

Limbaugh could feel this way for five, six weeks - longer than the 30 days
he gave himself to shake this thing.

Piper should know. She runs Turning Point of Tampa, a rehab clinic. She is
all too familiar with the effects of addiction.

It's reported Limbaugh took OxyContin, Lorcet, hydrocodone. Powerful stuff.
Piper's clients may be hooked on other drugs, or on alcohol. They may have
eating disorders. But in the end, addiction is addiction. There is no
greater leveler of humanity. It doesn't matter if you get your dope on the
streets or if you started, as is alleged here, with a legitimate
prescription from a doctor. It's all the same.

So Rush Limbaugh is in a tough place.

Not in his Palm Beach mansion. Not before that big microphone, basking in
the adulation of his 20-million listeners. He's very likely sitting on a
hard chair in a bare room in a 12-step meeting where he's hearing things he
doesn't like to hear about himself. In the addiction world, they call it
being right-sized.

And you can imagine with a man like Limbaugh, that would be no fun. He's too
used to being on top, looking down on people, doing the unloading.

He once said that if Jesse Jackson had his way, the District of Columbia
would be a new state, "New Columbia, appropriately named since there's drugs
and crime there."

I can't imagine him wanting to take those words back, but what about these:

He was talking about how whites seem to escape going to prison for drug
crimes while blacks do the time. "The answer to this disparity is not to
start letting people out of jail because we're not putting others in jail
who are breaking the law. The answer is to go out and find the ones who are
getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too."

Think there's room on that boat for the most bombastic man in America?

I don't want to pick on Limbaugh when he's down. Really, I don't. But this
is a man whose dominance on the radio - and verbal cruelty - have pushed
American politics to the merciless, nasty right for a decade. What kind of
compassion does he deserve, given what he's dished out?

"One of the things I want to do before I die is conduct the homeless
Olympics," he once said. He even listed a few events, among them, "the
10-Meter Shopping Cart Relay" "the Dumpster Dig," and "Hop, Skip and Trip."

Here was his take on unemployment: "Why is it that whenever a corporation
fires workers it is never speculated that the workers might have deserved
it?"

My personal favorite is Limbaugh's observation about the Grateful Dead's
Jerry Garcia, who died in drug treatment: "Jerry Garcia destroyed his life
on drugs. And yet he's being honored, like some godlike figure. Our
priorities are out of whack, folks."

They sure are. Somehow, Limbaugh was a hero, a man so powerful that the
first President Bush had him spend the night at the White House, in the
Lincoln bedroom.

He's fallen now. Limbaugh turns out to be failed and flawed like the rest of
us. What I wonder is whether his new place in the hierarchy, down a few
rungs, will change what comes out of his mouth; whether he will lay off the
homeless, the jobless and the drug-addicted, and develop a smidgen of
empathy.

Other people will watch to see if he is prosecuted. I doubt he will be. As
Limbaugh noted, there are two standards in this country for drug crimes. The
standards all but guarantee that rich white people stay out of jail.

It's not right, of course, but I can't imagine that Rush will ever complain
about that double standard again.